'Textalyzer' for phone designed for distracted driving

By Larry Williams II Times Record lwilliams@swtimes.com

Monday

May 8, 2017 at 12:01 AM

Though the National Safety Council’s Distracted Driving Awareness Month ended in April, the drive for stricter laws continues across the country, especially in New York, where legislators are hoping to introduce a device called the “Textalyzer” to law enforcement.

The Textalyzer would act, essentially, as a Breathalyzer for a driver’s phone, and allow police at crash sites to immediately determine whether a driver was using his or her phone. The device, according to Israel-based developers Cellebrite, a digital forensics company and subsidiary of Sun Corp., would allow police to determine only if swipes had been made on the phone’s screen at the time of a crash.

The idea immediately raised plenty of privacy concerns.

“I think I would have some privacy concerns with something like that, because it raises some potential Fourth Amendment issues” said Joey McCutchen, Fort Smith attorney and distracted-driving awareness advocate.

The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, and requires any warrant to be judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause. Currently, if police wish to obtain a person’s phone or phone records, a subpoena is required.

“I think those rights we have as citizens must take precedence,” said McCutchen. “Of course, on the other hand, you have distracted driving as a serious, as a very serious, safety concern, but I think that has to be weighed against our individual liberties.”

It’s a similar concern with the American Civil Liberties Union in New York, which has stalled the progress of the bipartisan Textalyzer bill in the New York state Senate. It’s also a concern with Michele Paden, a board member of the Arkansas Children’s Hospital and a founding member of Families Against Distractive Driving (FADD) in Mountain Home.

“Privacy is a fine line,” said Paden. “My nephew is a quadriplegic because of distracted driving, so any and everything we can do to deter it is a step in the right direction.”

Paden’s nephew was a passenger in a vehicular accident in which the driver freely admitted he was using his phone at the time of the accident. Paden says that instead of technology being used to solve the very problems that technology has created, stricter penalties need to be instituted to discourage distracted driving.

“Lives and families are affected by distracted driving, and the problem has become such that it’s worse than drinking and driving. You’re just as impaired when you’re texting or sending emails while driving, and I think the penalties a driver faces need to be just as strict.”

According to FADD, there are three types of distracted driving habits: visual, taking your eyes off the road; manual, taking your hands off the wheel; and cognitive, taking your mind off driving. It’s also why advocacy groups across the country are drawing comparisons between drinking and driving and texting and driving, and they have the startling statistics to back it up.

According to the National Safety Council, nearly half of all U.S. high school students 16+ have admitted to either texting or emailing while driving. Automakers have tried to make phone usage in cars hands free, but Paden says distracted driving is hard to enforce.

“It’s hard to police for distracted driving,” said Paden. “The laws are on the books and police can enforce them, but with penalties so low, drivers may still feel like it’s just a slap on the wrist.”

As for the Textalyzer, while it may seem like a digital savior to a safety issue akin to drinking and driving, which is also what inspired its name, for now, the old-fashion method may be the best. According to McCutchen, the time and cost involved in obtaining a warrant and subpoenaing phone records through the proper channels is minimal.

“In a civil context, it’s really not that difficult once you have the number and cellphone provider to pinpoint that if a crash happened at this time and the phone records show the driver on the phone at this time to determine liability. While I don’t work in the criminal context, I can’t imagine that it would be that much more difficult to go through the proper channels, present probable cause and obtain a warrant.”

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